Comparison study between ZnO and TiO2 in CuO based solar cell using SCAPS-1D

This work presents a numerical study of CuO-based solar cells with TiO2 as a window layer and compares zinc oxide (ZnO) using SCAPS-1D software. Those materials have many advantages such as simplicity of preparation, low-cost, rapid growth using non-sophisticated methods. The CuO-based solar cells have been reported to have low efficiency. The introduced parameters are based on an experimental measurement to validate the study and optimize the performance. The density of interface defect TiO2/CuO has been fixed at 1017 cm−2.In this simulation, the thickness and the charge carriers’ density have been varied for the window layer (TiO2, ZnO) and the absorber layer CuO. The results show that for TiO2, the optimal performance is recorded at a value of ND = 1019 cm−3 and a lower thickness. For the absorber layer, the highest value of PCE was obtained at NA = 1017 cm−3 and a thickness of 0.9 µm. The highest efficiency of TiO2/CuO solar cells after optimization was estimated at 19.65%. By repeating the same process for ZnO, the results show that the ZnO/CuO solar cell had an efficiency higher than the TiO2 (PCE = 22.04%) for a donor density of 1019 cm−3 and a thickness of 50 nm.